A chunk of tea is broken off from the brick-in which form it is imported from China-and tossed into a kettle of boiling water (p.41).
The Tibetans are great tea-drinkers, some of them drinking as much as seventy to eighty bowls per day…the Tibetan prefers the bitter-tasting Chinese tea-usually mixed with ashes and twigs when it is put up in pressed bricks for export to Tibet-to the higher-quality Indian and Ceylon teas (p.42).